turned his head as the car stopped. “Get your ass behind the wheel,” he said to Charleston Eddie. The doors were flung open and the change of drivers quickly took place. The ride the rest of the way back to the Baltic Street Garage was smooth.
“A hell of a score!” cried Pegleg as he limped into Wild Bill Lovett’s office. “We really gave it to them.”
“Yeah, I kinda figured you boys would,” Lovett said softly. “But you lost one, didn’t ya?”
The information had come from the backup team, which had watched the White Hand assassins fleeing the dance hall and had beaten them back to the garage. Wally Walsh had told Lovett that only three of the gang came out of Stauch’s.
No one had to identify the casualty for Wild Bill after Pegleg, Charlèston Eddie, and Irish Eyes Duggan walked into the office trailed by a sobbing Petey Bean.
“Okay, okay,” Lovett said awkwardly, giving the bereaved Petey a sidelong glance. “It hurts me very much that they knocked out Danny, but that’s the kind of chances we’re all taking in this friggin’ business.”
Lovett took a deep breath. “Now give it to me straight and no bullshit. I want to know what the score was.”
“High—very high,” Duggan replied in a self-contained voice. “We left a whole lot of them bleeding like pigs…”
“Yeah,” interrupted Charleston Eddie with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, “we really tore them apart. They had nobody at the door and we got in with no trouble. But then guess who we saw?” Eddie looked at Lovett, anticipating that he’d ask “who?” Instead, the White Hand’s chieftain snarled, “Cut out the fuckin’ questions and give me straight answers on the rundown!”
“Okay, okay, Bill,” Eddie cowered. “It was Rackets Capolla. You shoulda seen the look on his face when we hit him. You shoulda seen him standing up after we blasted him in the gut…”
Duggan and Lonergan described the rest of the massacre to Lovett, but Lovett’s reaction was subdued. He was pleased, but he didn’t want to stage a celebration because Petey Bean was there. Danny Bean didn’t mean a hell of a lot to Wild Bill Lovett—Danny was just another hand as far as he was concerned— yet in Petey Bean’s presence Lovett felt he should display a modicum of sorrow for the man who was left behind.
By 8:15 p.m. Surf Avenue was suddenly alive with traffic. Ambulances and police cars streamed toward Stauch’s Dance Hall, where nine people had caught the bullets and shotgun pellets in flight and were in need of medical attention.
Remarkably unlike the Sagaman’s Hall ambush, none of the six men and three women wounded by the gunfire was seriously injured; their wounds were uniformly minor ones. Fury Argolia, the restaurateur, had caught a slug in his right shoulder, but the bullet merely tore through the flesh without touching the bone.
Others were either grazed by bullets or hit with the spray of the shotguns at such great distances that the pellets merely pierced their skins. All nine of the wounded were extremely lucky. They were taken to Coney Island Hospital for emergency treatment, but not one of them was kept overnight as a patient. They were sent home after their wounds were patched.
Rackets Capolla, Anna Balestro, Giovanni Capone, and Momo Municharo were morgue cases. They were all given exquisite funerals. That was the least Frankie Yale could do for them. In fact, he charged the families only half price for the send-offs.
The fifth fatality of the shootout, Danny Bean, went to his requiem in a plain pine coffin because his gang boss, Wild Bill Lovett, didn’t have Frankie Yale’s connections with the undertaking industry. The White Hand always had to pay going retail rates for its funerals.
But the tears and eulogizing for Danny Bean were no less profound than the sobs and exaltations for Anna Balestro and the three Black Hand banditi who were laid out in their stately brass-handled mahogany caskets.
Emotions at the Italian funerals ran much higher, not only because their toll at Stauch’s was so much greater than the casualties the Irish had suffered, but also because one of their dead, Anna Balestro, was an innocent victim. Her death had been as unwarranted and cold-blooded as Mary Reilly’s. And it aroused as much outrage in Frankie Yale as Mary’s killing had stirred in Wild Bill Lovett.
While standing at Anna’s graveside beside her brother, Albert, Frankie wept unashamedly. With tears running down his cheeks, he whispered to Albert, “So help me, God, I’m gonna make those Irish sons of bitches pay through their noses for taking this girl’s life…”
Frankie put the palm of his right hand slowly up to his face, covering his lips. Then, just as slowly, he moved the hand outward, blowing a kiss.
It was a meaningful sign that had originated with the code of the so-called omerta traditions established during the rise of the Maffia in Sicily more than a century before.
It was the kiss of death.
Charleston Eddie’s Last Sunday Matinee Flick
In calculating the revenge he would take against the White Hand, Frankie Yale decided that it would be foolhardy to strike back pell-mell with another ambush or mass shooting. There’d been two bloodbaths in less than a month, one against each side, and what had really been achieved? The score was dead even: three White Handers and three Black Handers had been wiped out, along with one woman from each of the “families.”
“So what’s gonna happen if we hit ’em back?” Yale asked some of the boys who dropped into his office after Anna Balestro’s funeral. “Sure, we knock off a few more miserable micks. But then what happen? They come back at us again, maybe even waste our wives or girls. I don’t like it. They ain’t playing percentages.”
“What you got in mind?” Augie the Wop put in. “You think we should maybe not do nuthin’ for what they done, eh, Frankie?”
Augie didn’t intend to sound sarcastic, but the question was pregnant with derision.
The blood rising in his face, Yale jumped to his feet and brought his fist down on the desk. “Those big balls on you,” he bellowed, “you better take them to wherever you got ’em and get your old ones back. If you don’t, I’m gonna break ’em down to size.”
Pisano paled. He turned warily and stared at Yale’s compare, Don Giuseppe Balsamo, who was reposing in the maroon velvet armchair, the one Frankie’s father-in-law had liked so much until he died in it. Augie was seeking some support from the man who was his good friend. But Don Giuseppe had his gaze fixed on the floor in front of his feet, scrupulously avoiding Pisano’s eyes.
Sparing people from Frankie Yale’s wrath was not one of Balsamo’s commitments to his Mafia hefdom.
“Awright, Frankie, for chrissake, lay off him,” Fury Argolia pleaded. “He didn’t mean to insult you.”
Fury, his right arm in a black cloth sling to facilitate the healing of the bullet hole in his shoulder, was one of the select few Black Handers who could speak up to Yale and not incur his wrath. Frankie respected the fiery Argolia, because he measured a few
